Our colleague Curtis Houck’s earlier writeup of the new but not improved CBS Evening News suggests that the ongoing turmoil is driven by the newscast’s new format, editorial choices, and anchor delivery. Tonight’s report on efforts to end the war in Ukraine confirms that thesis.

Watch as anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DeBois open the newscast with an introduction to the Ukraine story:

The executive producer of "60 Minutes" remains defiant and CBS News' parent company mulls settling a lawsuit waged by President Donald Trump. 

Bill Owens, who has led the long-running program since 2019, took a tough stance against Trump during a Monday staff meeting, according to The New York Times.

"There have been reports in the media about a settlement and/or apology," Owens reportedly said. "The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done."

Thursday’s CBS News Special Report on the guilty verdict for former President Trump reveled in the sham trial brought by far-left Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg as “an extraordinary moment” of “enormous gravity” in which “everything about politics and law and our orientation to both are convulsed as never before”, but bemoaned the incoming “grievance war” from the Trump team and took exception to longtime correspondent Jan Crawford’s reality check.

Some of our major networks made an editorial decision not to cover the upcoming hearing, ordered by the judge overseeing the Trump trial in Atlanta, regarding misconduct allegations against Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis. We are thus reminded of that great Iowahawk quote: “Journalism is about covering important stories, With a pillow. Until they stop moving.”

Unlike NBC and CBS, ABC mustered the time and effort to cover the Willis saga. Watch a sample of their report below:

Beware of the Jihadi propaganda machine, liberal media. These terrorists know you’re anti-Israel. They know more likely than not that there are enough clowns who take the ‘two equal sides’ approach to this issue when there is none. A terrorist organization intentionally targeted civilians, raping, killing, and kidnapping them—subjecting children to torture and wholesale slaughter. Israel has warned Gaza civilians to vacate areas that could become warzones and do not intentionally target civilians despite what scores of anti-Israel leftists have declared in previous years.

Thursday morning marked the first official House committee hearing on the impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. But on the network morning news shows, CBS Mornings refused to preview it while ABC’s Good Morning America lost its mind about the inquiry occurring “absent evidence,” of Biden wrongdoing with no “direct, concrete evidence” and “[n]o bank account, money transfer, overt act” tying Joe to his son’s life of ruin.

When it comes to elections, the media should be pro-debate, especially when no votes have officially been cast, but the post-non Trump debate coverage on Thursday’s Good Morning America on ABC and CBS Mornings dismissed the whole thing as a “fantasy land” that resembled a “job interview” in which the candidate has already been selected.

ABC & CBS were in full meltdown mode on Thursday evening as their flagship evening newscasts ABC's World News Tonight and CBS Evening News acted like the end of the world was upon us if the U.S. debt ceiling wasn't raised without spending cuts, and focused their coverage on Republican demands instead of the intransigence of the Biden regime. 

CBS News reported this week that it had conducted an independent review of Biden’s laptop which showed “no evidence” that the laptop hard drive “was faked or tampered with.” 

That would have been useful reporting — two years ago.

When the New York Post first reported on some of the contents of the laptop in October 2020, much of the mainstream media and a group of more than 50 former senior intelligence officials dismissed the story as Russian disinformation.